Holiday traditions come in all forms — from age-old rituals to silly events that become family favorites without much effort.
William Brown, the director of “A Christmas Carol” at the Goodman Theatre, hosts an annual Christmas Eve dinner at his Ravenswood apartment devoted to a different country each year. Here, we talk to Brown, as well as some Tribune staff and readers of Smart, about their traditions.
For 15 or 16 years now we host a Christmas Eve dinner for theater people whose families are too far away or no longer around.
It started with an Italian feast of seven fishes, where you serve seven different kinds of seafood — which is quite an undertaking, but that’s part of the fun of it.
It started with the food and the way the table was set, the music we played, we sing music from the place. It became this whole evening that lasted about eight hours.
Two years ago we did imperial Russia. The table looked like someone could sign a treaty around it. It was gorgeous. This year we’re doing Spain.
It all sounds a little Martha Stewart, but it’s not at all. It’s just a way to focus attention and be together. It’s a beautiful way to learn something too — we all go away knowing something new.
People in the theater have a way of making their own families … and the toasts are always about how lucky we are, how extremely lucky we are, to have each other and be together on that night and have so much love and care in the room.
— William Brown, director of “A Christmas Carol”
Each year since they were very young, I’ve bought my son, Michael, 22, and my daughter, Madeline, 19, Christmas ornaments to commemorate a special occurrence during the year.
The black leather ice skate ornament was for 1992 when a 6-year-old Michael took lessons. He didn’t like ice skating, but I smile every time he hangs that small trinket on our tree. And there’s an electric guitar, a soccer ball, a baseball and bat, and on and on.
Madeline’s favorite is the ballet slipper ornament I purchased when she was 5 and in love with wearing leotards and tutus and twirling through the dance studio. She also has ornaments for choir and soccer, the Lion King and, of course, an expensive glass rendering of the Madeline character from the children’s book.
Each of them has their own box to store the ornaments. It’s an event to open the boxes and wrap our brains once again around familiar memories while we put up the tree.
When they leave our home for good and set up housekeeping on their own, they won’t begin their adult lives with a bare Christmas tree or one that’s decorated with those awful matching ornament sets. They’ll take their boxes and have their own special ornaments and a piece of their pasts to hang on their very own trees.
— Terri Colby
You might call our house Tradition Central, and with both Hanukkah and Christmas unfolding in our Jewish-Catholic house, we’ve got plenty to work with.
Perhaps our favorites are the Feast of St. Nick, on Dec. 6, when each one of us leaves a shoe outside the bedroom door the night before, and during the night that clodhopper or penny loafer or clog is filled with the requisite orange, some beautiful foil-wrapped chocolates, and a few little trinkets I gather at Old World sorts of shops that make me feel, well, merry.
Another favorite is the Saturday before Christmas when my little one and I — and whoever else we can corral — gather a basket filled with pine cones, a pie plate of bird seed, another one with globs of peanut butter and we start making enough ornaments to fill a crabapple tree just beyond the kitchen door. We usually string cranberries till our fingertips start to throb.
It is all for our tree for the birds, and as we make the pine-cone treats I tell my little one all about St. Francis, the patron saint of woodland creatures, and about how his Grammy taught me to love birds and care for them with all my heart.
— Barbara Mahany
In the past two years or so, my kids have taken to Stan Freberg’s 1955 song, “Nuttin’ for Christmas,” which I have on a Dr. Demento holiday CD. Even after I play it for the 14th time in a row, my 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter still crack up. They sing along in giddy, squeaky voices: “I spilled some ink on mommy’s rug!/ I made Tommy eat a bug!/ Bought some gum with a penny slug!/ Somebody snitched on me!” Then, they run around the kitchen like little elves who’ve had a little too much sugar poured in their egg nog.
For the record: “Nuttin’ for Christmas” is about a rotten tyke who’s in cahoots with a sneak thief dressed as Santa Claus. The kid shows him where the silverware is stashed, and they split the loot. As much as Christmas is reverent — our family will light Advent candles — it should also be fun. And sometimes an adult needs a kid to show him the way back to childlike Christmas glee. All it takes is a song that’s 53 years old, sung by a son who’s 6 and a daughter who’s 4.
— Louis R. Carlozo
From my second year onward, the holidays meant Lionel trains. My father built a folding plywood table for them in our small apartment. The table was so large that as he worked the transformer, wearing a striped engineer’s cap, he sat over the threshold of another room. He had covered the table with green felt to indicate grass, elaborately arranged the track plus lighted buildings, set the out-of-scale Christmas tree in the center and tacked down a miniature picket fence on the perimeter to suggest that visitors should keep out of his handiwork.
I still have the trains. A relative who was a lawyer once wrote a letter, offering to cheat me out of them. The last time they were up, without benefit of Dad’s table, Eisenhower was in the White House.
When collectors hear this, they go on and on about how the trains are worth more if I have the original boxes — as, indeed, I do. My tradition for Recession Christmases is to take the trains out of storage and look at the boxes.
— Alan G. Artner
As our children have grown older and begun to leave the nest, we’ve begun to encounter conflicting needs if in-laws have become part of any holiday plans. We solved this by choosing to have our family get-together on Christmas Eve, which frees everyone to celebrate Christmas Day with others if they need to do so.
There is something wonderful and intimate about celebrating the holiday the night before the big event, and it has become something we all look forward to.
— Rick Tuma
On Christmas Eve, the kids get in their PJs (well, they used to, but they haven’t seen PJs in years) and then bundle up. We make hot chocolate (with marshmallows!), grab Christmas cookies and hop in the car armed with our favorite Christmas CDs.
We drive off to a specific neighborhood to take in the Christmas lights, listen to Rosie O’Donnell and the Dixie Chicks, Ricky Martin (really) and enjoy our goodies. It’s great. We’re all really close to each other, we’re all happy and when we get home, the kids are ready to pack it in.
And I, hopefully, get a second wind to finish wrapping gifts and filling stockings!
— Elaine Matsushita
I fly around the house like a witch on a broomstick, and force all my housemates into semi-annual house cleaning chores. This occurs, as I said, semi-annually: the week of Thanksgiving and the day before Christmas.
This tradition causes warm, fuzzy feelings, and I am quite sure everyone looks forward to this bonding opportunity.
— Lynn Brezina, Chicago
Each year my boys (ages 8 and 6) and I choose a “Christmas Scroll” with a child’s name, age and Christmas wish list. We go shopping together and choose gifts for the child, then wrap them and drop them off at the donation center (this is through a local non-profit organization that benefits needy children).
It’s nice to see my boys thinking of others and doing something special to help someone else.
— Tina Borgeson, Manteca, Calif.
Each Eid — a Muslim holiday — we dress in our finest and attend a special morning prayer to remind us of the day’s significance, literally count our blessings and remember those less fortunate.
Then we gather with our nuclear family at home to enjoy each other’s company while noshing traditional Pakistani snacks, such as samosas and a sweet rice pudding called kheer.
And, of course, we exchange presents — kids get toys, and big kids and young adults receive the ever-pleasing gift of cash.
We’re lucky to have lots of close extended family in town, so often all of the several Arain families spend the whole day traveling from house to house to greet each other warmly and sample spread after tasty spread.
— Fauzia Arain
My dad has been responsible for trimming the tree ever since he and Mom were newlyweds. Their first Christmas, he made the fatal error of telling her that she didn’t know how to properly decorate a Christmas tree. Mom said, “You’re right,” and it was his job from then on.
Mom’s role, meanwhile, evolved to preventing Dad from throwing away the hideous ornaments my brothers and I made as kids. Even with such lame material, Dad has always made the tree beautiful and unique.
This year, after five decades of live trees, they’re making the switch to artificial. But the Styrofoam-cup bells and the Shrinky Dinks will never be replaced!
— Nancy Watkins
